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Jul 27 2026
Cloud

5 Questions for Avoiding Mistakes in Multicloud Environments

Agencies that win at multicloud don’t just use more platforms. They create the operational discipline to run them as business enablers.

Many federal agencies don’t choose multicloud; they arrive at multicloud. Maybe an acquisition brought Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads into a Microsoft Azure shop. Maybe the data science team adopted Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for its machine learning tooling.

Here are five questions to ask to avoid mistakes in multicloud management.

1. Do Applications Run the Same Way On Every Cloud?

True multicloud doesn’t mean running identical deployments everywhere for redundancy. That’s expensive and operationally complex. It means using each cloud for what it does best and ensuring portability where it matters.

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2. Should Teams Choose Their Own Tooling?

Autonomy is good, but anarchy isn’t. When every team picks its own continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline, monitoring stack, and secret management tool, officials end up with an unmanageable patchwork. Standardize the platform layer and give teams freedom at the application layer.

3. Should Agencies Transfer Workloads Despite Costs?

Data transfer between clouds can be expensive, and large data sets create gravitational pull. Once a data lake is on AWS, moving compute to GCP for “the best price” may cost more in egress than saved in compute. Map government data flows before making placement decisions.

READ MORE: Modernize your agency’s IT with cutting-edge cloud technology.

4. Does Hiring More People Help To Manage Clouds?

If the response to multicloud complexity is “hire more people,” agencies set out on a losing trajectory. Invest in automation for provisioning, patching, scaling, incident response and cost optimization. Or, outsource to a great team. People should be designing systems, not manually configuring them.

5. Should I Prepare for Disaster Recovery?

Having workloads on multiple clouds might automatically grant agencies some resilience, but it doesn’t automatically provide disaster recovery. Test failover scenarios regularly. Too many organizations discover their multicloud DR strategy doesn’t work the first time they actually need it.

Illustration by Jon Reinfurt